Avery Shaw Mystery Series

Halloween is Avery Shaw’s favorite time of year. What’s not to love? Slasher movies, hot chocolate, and corn mazes. She’s addicted to them all. During a visit to one of those mazes, she runs across several men trying to kidnap a teenage girl. In true Avery fashion, she intervenes...resulting in a severe injury. While she’s on the mend, she starts tracking information on a group of people working in the area.

Avery Shaw likes to win. Unfortunately, her single-minded focus on being declared victor tends to get her into trouble. That’s never more true than when she decides to take on her archnemesis Tad Ludington. With an election coming up, Avery is ready to let her freak flag fly in an attempt to get Tad to show his true colors on television...thus sabotaging his chance at getting into office. That backfires when, after a truly epic meltdown, Tad is shot and left for dead in his own home.

Avery Shaw has the world at her fingertips...and a pile of dead Santas near the railroad tracks. Interestingly, she’s more focused on the Santas than her personal life, but only because she’s been warned that a proposal is imminent from her live-in love Eliot Kane and she needs to look somewhere else - anywhere else will do - rather than accept what he’s trying to offer. Avery never pictured herself married but it appears it might be happening...no matter how she tries to dodge and weave. The Santas make an enticing distraction, so Avery throws herself in with gusto.

With matrimony barreling down on her, she needs a distraction, and she gets it in the form of a warning. Apparently, she’s on the hit list for a local dealer who is trying to move in on turf she’s responsible for cleaning up, and news that she could be marked for death has her fiancé Eliot Kane in a tailspin. She wants her happily ever after, and she’s determined nothing is going to stop her...not even death. Strap in and get ready, because Avery Shaw is taking no prisoners. Not this time.

Avery Shaw is back from her honeymoon and on the prowl for a story. She wants to prove that marriage has softened her - nothing ever could - and the way she’s going to do that is by rocking the news world with something monumental. Then a body drops in her neighborhood, only blocks away from her house, and the hunt is on. The victim is divorced, having an affair with a married coworker, and generally unlikable. Avery has multiple places to look for a suspect...and then another woman dies only a block away from Avery’s house, and the entire dynamic of the story changes.

Taking down a killing team means Avery Shaw is getting a lot of attention. It’s almost too much attention. That’s why she’s ready for a new story, and when one falls in her lap, she’s more than ready to flip the script. When leaving the courthouse, she witnesses two men in a car trying to abduct a local woman. She intervenes, but when the dust settles, the woman is nowhere to be found, and people are telling her that she’s reading too much into the situation. She knows better. Unfortunately, nobody will listen.

Avery Shaw wants things to go back to normal, but it’s not easy when she’s the current darling of the Detroit media market. Everybody wants a piece of her, and she prefers covering the news rather than being part of it. That’s why she jumps at the chance to cover a quadruple murder on the lake, even though it’s her day off. Avery realizes right away that the murders weren’t a crime of passion. No, this was a planned hit, and it leads her to look at the old mob faces in the county, who don’t exactly want to invite her into their homes.

Avery Shaw thought she’d seen it all. Then she gets the sort of call she never expected. Buried in a part of the city she never visits, across the road from the Dairy Queen of all places, is Antique Dolls. It’s a niche strip club featuring dancers over the age of 40…and a very unique clientele.

Avery Shaw is looking forward to a quiet—but entertaining—day in court when a furious plaintiff takes off after losing what Avery believes to be one of the funniest cases she’s ever covered. Avery gives chase because she wants an interview, and her life is thrown into turmoil during the melee that follows.

Avery Shaw is on the hunt for action and adventure. The last place she thinks she’s going to find it is at a motivational retreat in northern Macomb County. I mean…how strong can someone be if they’re only eating tree bark, right? When one of the guests turns up dead, however, Avery gets assigned the story. She’s barely interested…until she realizes the camp is designed like a certain village from one of her favorite movies. Huts dispersed through various trees, with a huge platform and an open fireplace? Sounds like heaven…in a suburb far, far away.

Avery Shaw thinks things are bumping right along—her ongoing war with the ducks invading her pool notwithstanding—but she’s quickly disavowed of that notion when her arch nemesis Tad Ludington’s task force invades her backyard and arrests her cousin Mario on suspicion of serial murder. Mario has been in trouble before—not of his making—but this time the deck seems to be stacked against him…right up until Avery realizes that Tad is bringing charges with zero proof. He can’t even prove that women are dead.